There are some things that J2EE has which you would have to build yourself if you wanted them in Perl. However, most of them are of no use to most projects.

I often hear people say that J2EE is an "easier sell" to VCs, yet none of the most successful startups of the past few years have used Java as their primary language. The only I can think of is eBay, and that was a rewrite from C++. Java is definitely the language of choice in huge, slow-moving corporations, but startups often use Python, C, Perl, Lisp, etc.

If people question you about the scalability of Perl, you might mention to them some of the companies that make extensive use of Perl: Amazon, Yahoo, Overture, TicketMaster, CitySearch, IMDB...

You don't know - the OP's grandmother may be a mechanic. A more apt comparison is to ask me about the internals of a car. That's likely to convert your $30,000 car into an oversized paperweight if you follow any of my directions. Exceptions: filling up with gas, going faster, slowing down, and turning. Don't ask anything more complicated than that.

Incidentally, even the ones who use Java tend to not use J2EE these days. eBay's rewrite was in Java, but they had to drop most of J2EE because they couldn't make it scale big enough. Now, there's practically no one else with the scalability challenges of eBay, but still...

So, if you feel you need to use Java, consider using a lightweight approach based on open source Java tools.